Developing Mobile Applications on the Android Platform

Android is a new mobile platform. Developments of mobile applications on Android have attracted a lot of attention and interest in research and industry communities. Android is the first free, open source, and fully customizable mobile platform. In this chapter, we walk through steps in developing a mobile application on the Android platform. Through an exemplary application of EPG (Electronic Program Guide) recommender framework, we present key steps in developing an Android application including how to create Android project and class, how to build simple user interface, how to utilize networking protocols and how to handle events. With the increased attention of Android and growing number of Android based mobile phones available on the market, we believe this chapter will timely help researchers rapidly prototype mobile applications to prove concepts of their research results.